


Leave Me Your Stardust To Remember You By

by avoidingavoidance



Series: EreMarco Week 2015 [5]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, EreMarco Week, M/M, filthy hipster starlight metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 19:50:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4638078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avoidingavoidance/pseuds/avoidingavoidance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren <i>loves</i> stargazing.</p>
<p>It’s something he picked up from Marco, although he thinks they approach it from fundamentally different angles.</p>
<p>(eremarco week day 5: lights/stars)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave Me Your Stardust To Remember You By

**Author's Note:**

> i have a [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)
> 
> oh god i'm so sorry

Eren _loves_ stargazing.

It’s something he picked up from Marco, although he thinks they approach it from fundamentally different angles.

When they’re outside past curfew in the cold, quiet night, sitting in the fields of tall grass beyond the barracks where they’re less likely to be caught, Marco casts his gaze into the vibrant heavens, and in that moment, it always seems to Eren as if Marco’s trusting the stars with everything he has to catch his attention and take him away from here for a while. 

There’s just something about the way Marco drifts away when they’re alone, shrouded in pitch and wreathed in a sea of stars. Like he’s finding solace, or maybe love, maybe even God. Eren’s not sure. Whatever it is, it’s undeniably reverent, and the slow-ticking hours Marco spends in the welcoming arms of the autumn constellations seem like something precious, something sacred to him. Eren often wonders if he’s intruding. He’s always felt that it’s almost painfully intimate, maybe too intimate to watch. 

Even so, Marco always asks him to come along. He’s welcome company then, in the few still hours between lights-out and dawn, so Eren always gives up precious sleep so that he can come and gaze at the stars with Marco.

\--

Eren quickly learns the well-trodden paths of the wandering stars, but for all his careful observation, he learns them backwards.

He learns to map the heavens in the twinkling light reflected in Marco’s wide eyes, reversed images spread shimmering over dark, dark, dark brown, and should anyone ever ask him, Eren’s sure that he could paint the entirety of the endless cosmos from his mirror memory alone.

It’s not just his eyes, though.

The backwards map of the night sky seems to Eren to write itself across Marco’s beautiful face in its entirety, claiming his soft, sun-dark skin for itself in the cool absence of day, and the winding constellations born from the depths of Marco’s eyes trickle and flow in dappled, inky starlight across his brow, down his nose, concentrated in swirling clusters over his high cheekbones.

That’s the universe Eren has memorized. Those are the only constellations Eren knows how to find, and in his opinion, those are the only ones he needs.

Let Marco take the far-above suns for himself, to find comfort among them. 

Eren has no need of them.

\--

“What do you think they are?” Marco asks one night, his whisper near-silent in the crisp autumn air.

“I dunno,” Eren replies, swallowing the soft crack in his voice. “Armin says they’re balls of fire.”

Marco laughs quietly, wrapping his arms a little more tightly around his bent knees, hugging them to his chest. “Fire? Then why are they blue?”

“Are they?” Eren honestly hadn’t noticed.

Silence falls between them once more, and Marco’s eyes shine even in the barest sliver of moonlight. 

“I wonder...” Marco sighs, his voice trailing off until Eren nudges his knee against him, prompting him to continue. “It’s nothing.”

“Tell me,” Eren pleads, shifting close enough that their chilled shoulders touch.

For a long while, Marco doesn’t finish his thought, and there’s nothing between Eren and the painted void but the soft flutter of long, dark eyelashes.

“I wonder if my family’s up there,” Marco whispers finally, the words tight in his throat, and the sea of stars tosses in the sudden swell of tears flooding his eyes. “My mom, my dad... my sisters...”

Eren doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t.

“Your mom, too,” Marco hums after a moment. 

His own vision swims, further blurring and bending the familiar starscape before him.

“Maybe,” he mumbles, trying not to sound as choked up as he is, because he doesn’t want Marco to feel bad for making him cry and because he doesn’t want to start crying harder.

The stars above them twist and turn, and Eren watches them curl in fractals through the tears that linger in Marco’s eyes until exhaustion begins to tug at them both.

“Maybe we’ll all end up there too,” Marco breathes, his tired eyelids drooping, and when he lowers his gaze to the grass, long-held tears spill like shooting stars down his cheeks. “I think... maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Yeah,” Eren rasps, roughly scrubbing his own eyes with his sleeve before he stands. He offers his hand to Marco, who smiles sleepily and lets Eren pull him to his feet, and in the brief moment that Marco stumbles into him as he stands on his numb legs, Eren breathes in his cold-grass smell like smoke.

\--

Whenever the Survey Corps ventures outside the walls, Eren takes the night guard as much as he can, and no one ever questions it.

The stars look so foreign where they hang in the sky, backwards and crooked and all wrong from the map he’d so carefully memorized, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t ever seem to draw lines between them to form even a nameless ghost of his favorite constellations. In fact, in the endless void of the crowded night sky, Eren can only ever seem to find one star every time he looks. It’s the only reliable one, and it’s the brightest and bluest out of all of them. 

Eren names it Marco, and when he watches it wander the heavens in a slow arc, he wonders if it's happy.


End file.
